Choking on the Yellow Thick Chode.

Honestly, I don’t know how Zooey Deschanel continues to get work.

In TIN MAN, a re-visioning of L. Frank Baum’s THE WIZARD OF OZ, Zooey is ersatz Dorothy, named DG (oh, that’s soo street-cred!), lost in the magical world of O.Z. (the Outer Zone – oooh! That’s even more street!), and aided by three inhabitants of the Zone, who are analogs of the Scarecrow Without A Brain, the Tin Man Without A Heart and The Lion Without The Noive; they are named Glitch, Wyatt Cain and Raw (ooooooh! That’s the most street-credible credibleness of all! Please, oh please, may I bow down before you and self-flagellate for my uncouth uncoolness?)

The title refers to Wyatt (Neal McDonough) being a sheriff (tin star/tin man – ha! Get it?) – AND – he is found imprisoned in a steel iron maiden device. Ha! This movie is just full of those things called ideas! (May I please lie on a bed of nails to punish myself for my dearth of originality?) He’s out for revenge on the people who imprisoned him and made him watch re-runs of his family dying. Hey, it might have been an iron maiden, but at least it had cable.

The ersatz scarecrow is Glitch (Alan Cumming), once an advisor to the Queen, fallen out of favor and caged in a hanging prison like a go-go dancer. DG is thrown in with him and continues to un-act while he shows her the zipper in his head where they removed his brain (shouldn’t he just collapse in a heap or something? I thought the brain controlled, oh, EVERYTHING).

The great Raoul Trujillo is the ersatz Lion “Raw” who makes an assface of himself by looking like a cross between a bum and a Barbary sheep, and being seen so close to Zooey Deschanel.

After witnessing the unbridled vapidity of Zooey delivering every line blanker than a bedsheet, we must surmise that those acting teachers that told her she would never be an actor were right. Any jackass can do what she is doing – but it isn’t what anyone in their right mind would call acting.

The Sorceress (Kathleen Robertson, perfect physical beauty), is the magical villain: two armored neck plates which she wears constantly, so wondering why she keeps her BREASTS so open to attack – picturesque tattoos, targets for man-tongue, grab apple Bs crushed to resemble Ds, penile landing site.

And Richard Dreyfuss (oh God! Was he that hard up for work?!) is the Wonderful Mystic Man of O.Z.

TIN MAN might have been a dark adventure through new territory in an old realm; there are even some interesting twists involving DG’s parents and their relationship to the Outer Zone; instead, we get Zooey Deschanel reading her lines like a cooking recipe.

Surrounded by actual actors, Zooey does nothing for this TV mini-series (directed by Nick Willing) except bog it in the cowdung from whence she sprung. I constantly ask myself: Are these filmmakers not watching the rushes? It’s like having a veteran cast of British thespians and well-respected American actors – and then having Hayden Christensen play the lead. If you can stand Zooey’s bland delivery, bug eyes working overtime to disguise the fact she doesn’t know what to do with her monotonous face, you may be able to work your way torturously to the end of this 3-parter. Me, I’m busy bowing down before the filmmakers for their bravery in making it through a whole production without laughing at Zooey’s unthinkably ignorant attempts at acting.

Honestly, I don’t know how Zooey Deschanel continues to get work.

END

Follow the yellow slick road…

An origin tale of how a sideshow charlatan becomes the Wizard of Oz, OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL is as wondrous and exciting as the film that inspired it, which means it is kaleidoscopically trippy and makes no sense.

In 1905 sepia-toned Kansas, James Franco is carnival magician Oscar Diggs, a womanizing narcissist, swept away in a tornado to a bombastic Technicolor land where animals talk, magic exists and women are (still) witches. He uses his duplicity and illusionist sleight of hand to dupe the populace into thinking he is the great Wizard spoken of in legends, and is emplaced in the Emerald Palace just before Judy Garland arrives with all the good drugs.

First there was the vaudeville B-Movie that became a legend in 1939, THE WIZARD OF OZ; the blaxploitation remake THE WIZ in 1978; the dark, largely-overlooked RETURN TO OZ in 1985 (which would be appreciated more readily in these DARK KNIGHT times); and now, adhering to the fad of the age, OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL is a prequel exploring how the Wizard became The Man Behind The Curtain.

An intriguing concept, the visually gluttonous GREAT AND POWERFUL could have been darker, but unfortunately ends up drowning in Disney syrup (except for the fearsome flying baboons, which I suspect caused as much sleep trauma for today’s kids as the now puppet-looking flying monkeys caused for 1939’s kids). Its pedigree will give it more impetus than it deserves, umbilically linked as it is with 1939’s WIZARD. Not to say that WIZARD was a daring film – a product of its times, only achieving classic status for the fact that parents keep administering it to their children as readily as Ritalin, lending it more credibility than the half-baked LSD trip that it really is.

When Oscar lands in Oz, he meets three women (Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams), all of whom seem morally ambiguous; no matter how tasty each of them looks, they all have some ulterior agenda and at the slightest prompting are apt to suddenly turn into evil witches – in other words, they’re your average woman.

One of the witches (claiming to be “good”) sends Oscar on a quest to destroy the “evil” witch in order to claim his castle of gold. On his quest along the yellow brick road, Oscar is aided by a monkey called Monkey (Zach Braff) and a cute little china girl that he calls Little China Girl. (She seems like Jena Malone, but she is voiced by Joey King.) They all, in turn, call him Wizard. An endearing moment when Oscar tells the china girl of “a real wizard – Thomas Alva Edison – the Wizard of Menlo Park.” A very cool real world credit in this fantasy film.

Directed by Sam Raimi (of the SPIDER-MAN trilogy, which means that Bruce Campbell will somehow make a cameo – he does, as an Emerald City Guard), GREAT AND POWERFUL looks striking, and will amuse the same demographic that the original film was aimed at (i.e. very young hyperactive kids on Ritalin). And James Franco is the perfect foil for this land where duplicity reigns over naïveté, able to pull off that innocent smile to sell his snake-oil, yet having the braggadocio to counter the witches.

It’s a great angle – that of an illusionist tricking his way into the post of Wizard; that is, after all, what the actual “wizard” turns out to be in WIZARD OF OZ – a charlatan. And strangely, it is through his mendacity that Oscar finds redemption, as the very same trickery he used to charm people into believing he was a Wizard is employed to defeat the evil witches.

But there’s a conceptual problem: when you bring REAL MAGIC into the mix, it skews everything, including good storytelling, because the boundaries of Real Magic are never delineated. For example, when the baboon grabs the good witch, she has her wand with her – a wand that can conjure tornadoes of fire and liquid nitrogen and laser blasts – yet the baboon grabs her anyway. Was the wand battery low or something? And why is china girl so amazed at Edison creating “pictures that move” when she lives in a world where witches can fly in bubbles and shoot lethal energy bolts from their hands? And she’s a porcelain doll that lives and breathes, against all biological laws! Gimme some rules, people!

And the greatest conundrum of all: how could the evil witches possibly be fooled by Oscar’s trickery? Playing devil’s advocate, I guess that in a world of REAL magic, you would not be expecting, nor would you even conceive of, someone bringing ILLUSION into the fray. So when Oscar projects his face onto the town square in a pillar of smoke, these witches would be inclined to believe that he must be using magic, because in their minds there is no other option. Still, I’m sure the 5 – 15 demo is not rationalizing this scenario.

They’re all on Ritalin.

END

If you’re thinkin’ of being my remake, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.

Took brass balls to remake the legendary WIZARD OF OZ – or maybe just black balls. The pinky-white euphemism “urban” doesn’t disguise THE WIZ for what it is – a black version of THE WIZARD OF OZ.

It’s what the original WIZARD OF OZ desperately needed to be: more raw, more earthy, more funkaaaay. On paper, THE WIZ sounds cool as James Brown in a popsicle factory. On stage (music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls), the 1975 Broadway production won seven Tony awards. On film… uh, well, on stage it won seven Tony awards…

Dorothy (Diana Ross) is a Harlem kindergarten teacher who is transported via a snowstorm to the Land of Oz (i.e. New York on LSD), where she is told that the only person who can get her home is the powerful Wiz in the Emerald City, which she can find by easing on down the yellow brick road. Along the way, she meets three misfits who join her trek, Scarecrow (Michael Jackson), Tinman (Nipsey Russell) and Lion (Ted Ross).

The story retains all the themes and messages of the original – that of belief in yourself, with each character exhibiting the characteristics they think they lack – and the throughline of seeking the Wiz for favors. Then there are the brainless messages, as when Dorothy is captured and lets all her friends get mutilated instead of surrendering her slippers to the wicked witch (Mabel King). Just when we think Dorothy has such staunch principles, the witch threatens to fry Dorothy’s dog Toto (which isn’t even cute) and she relents. Hey, nice priorities: let your friends die but don’t harm the pet. Take notes, kids.

Joel Schumacher (CAR WASH) screenplays THE WIZ for director Sidney Lumet (DOG DAY AFTERNOON). Really? Two whiteys in charge?

At least they retained composer Charlie Smalls’s music, augmented by Quincy Jones as MD/composer. And that makes the music – contrary to most musicals – the only redeeming factor in THE WIZ. Usually in musicals, we tune out when the action stops for the tiresome musical numbers; here, with Smalls and Jones in super funky mode, the songs are the most interesting diversions. Not all of them are catchy or enjoyable the first time round, and some may sound disco-dated, but for the most part, they raise the pedestrian level of the action tenfold.

To wit: the movie’s signature song Ease On Down The Road (equivalent to the original’s We’re Off To See The Wizard); or check out the powerful tenor on Ted Ross as the Lion and the saucy brass section on his signature tune, I’m A Mean Ole Lion. (I especially like his high-heeled paws!) Like the original, the Lion garners the most laughs (until Richard Pryor appears and then it’s all laughs on him).

Years on, the achievement of the monumental dance numbers in the Emerald City still amaze, with Quincy Jones cameoing as a piano player.

Lena Horne cameos as good witch Glinda. And Richard Pryor is The Wiz! (Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for The Wiz to be the great and powerful Quincy Jones?) And the same twisted messages of magic muddled with platitudes wash over us like a retarded tsunami.

In the end (except for some of the songs) THE WIZ is as silly and badly-structured as THE WIZARD OF OZ. Only blacker.

END

The Wizarding World of Non-Oz-Sense.

It’s Judy Garland’s first ever head trip! A victim of prescribed, mind-altering drugs later in her career, maybe she was just trying to recreate her glory days in THE WIZARD OF OZ?

It was 1939 and the Hollywood studio system was churning out so many “musicals” that singing irrelevantly amidst the storyline had become not only passé but expected. Keep in mind THE WIZARD OF OZ rose above the engine-pit of Hollywood dreck purely on the strength of its re-releases and television reruns. At the time of its theatrical release, it was box office mud. Though a lot of care was admittedly put into the production, it was “just another musical,” adapted from the children’s book by L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Tin Cuke

Now it’s a classic. And although it’s a fun romp through a mine field of hallucinogenic surrealism, barring a few memorable performances and iconic moments, most of THE WIZARD OF OZ is outdated, overacted and under-thought. It was voted one of the “20 Most Overrated Movies Of All Time” by Premiere Magazine. And this surreal cucumber concurs: in the sense that it has its moments, but is only a must-see childhood film because parents are indoctrinated to force it onto their kids at some point in their wretched upbringing. Entering the bloodstream at an early age, it becomes impossible to flense its influence on our credulous baby minds and view WIZARD for what it is; a mediocre musical with kooky characters and preposterous platitudes. It has become impossible to – ironically – pull back the curtain…

Dorothy (Judy Garland), a young farm girl in a sepia-toned rural Kansas, and her little dog Toto, are transported via a twister to a magical land of Oz (which hits us like a Technicolor Molotov cocktail), where she befriends three insecure characters, a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a Tin Man (Jack Haley) and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), and they all journey down the yellow brick road to see the purportedly omniscient Wizard of Oz to ask him to grant their wishes; Dorothy’s wish: passage home.

Scarecrow wants “a brain,” Tin Man wants “a heart,” Cowardly Lion wants “the nerve.” These three cut-ups are the backbone of WIZARD, and rightly so, with such well-crafted makeup and solid characterizations, that it’s a safe bet they were doing the best drugs on set.

When Dorothy first meets Scarecrow, he advises to go down one road, then down another, then adds, “Of course, people do go both ways!” Well, you should know, fruity straw guy…

All three get a chance to sing probably the least gay song in the movie, If I Only Had A Brain, replacing the words as necessary to their idiom (Tin Man: a Heart, Lion: the Nerve – or, as he pronounces it, the “noive”). Lahr’s eccentric, mincing Cowardly Lion steals the show (he even gets an extra solo spot to vibrato comedically, If I Were King Of The Forest), and we see where those Warner Bros. cartoons we love so much cribbed a lot of their inspiration, with his twitchy oafishness and Edward G. Robinson accent.

And Toto the dog pulls one of the best animal performances ever committed to screen; a sedately cute little doggie-thesp amidst all that flummery and hullabaloo. The filmmakers don’t try for cuteness by making Toto do precious things in cutaways – everything he does is in the master shots without any specific focus on him. That’s why he’s so cute. He was trained and blocked so well that they didn’t need closeups to punctuate his actions; like dutifully following Dorothy around the spiral beginnings of the yellow brick road, whilst all those loud-colored munchkins flollop around singing and dancing like M&Ms on crack; like patiently sitting on a plough and putting his paw out to be shaken while Garland croons her signature tune, Somewhere Over The Rainbow. He even plays a pivotal part in rescuing Dorothy when he escapes the witch’s castle to find the three mincing doofuses back in the forest and lead them to the castle.

And let’s not forget: Toto is the one who exposes the Wizard! The kid’s priceless!

At every opportunity, the gang bursts into We’re Off To See The Wizard (one of the film’s many iconic songs), and traipse gaily down the yellow brick road – cutting just before they smack their noses on the painted cycloramas across the back of the sound stage.

Frank Morgan (as the Wizard) actually plays five roles, including Marvel the Magician in Kansas, a conman with a heart, as he poignantly tricks the runaway Dorothy into wanting to return home.

But it’s too late. The tornado hits the farm and Dorothy’s whole house is blown away with her in it, landing in Oz and apparently killing a “Wicked Witch of the East,” whose ruby slippers were the envy of every hooker in Munchkinland.

When it is taken for granted the movie as a whole is “delightful,” I think people are forgetting that the whole Munchkinland sequence, populated with kaleidoscopic dwarfs singing treacle in chipmunk-tweaked voices, should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention as torture. (In this respect, Charlie Smalls and Quincy Jones should be commended for updating the musical numbers in their 1978 “blaxploitation” remake THE WIZ. Most musical films become dated after the passage of years, as musical styles buck and trend – look at The Village People’s CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC (1980) – became dated as it was being edited! Anyone still doing The Shake? The Milkshake, The Milkshake – Do The Shake!)

Like “Play it again, Sam,” Dorothy’s quote about not being in Kansas anymore has been defiled to the point of obscurity. The correct quote: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

As her eyes try to adjust to the ocular raping, a good fairy appears – no, not Freddie Mercury – Glinda (Billie Burke), the blonde, bubble-headed “Good Witch of the North,” with a voice that makes you want to take a crowbar to her skull. In that insufferable mewling, she asks Dorothy whether she is a good witch or a bad witch for killing the East Si-eede wiccan. Dorothy counters that she isn’t a witch at all and compliments Glinda that she didn’t know there were beautiful witches such as her, to which Glinda replies, “Only bad witches are ugly.” Which Dorothy should have read as the veiled insult it was: So you had to ASK whether I was a good witch because I’m that close to bad-witch-ugly? (Through her life, Garland would have self-esteem issues over her looks; did they subliminally start with this insensitive witchbitch?)

But though Glinda proclaims herself “good,” we realize her moniker of “Good Witch” is merely agitprop, as throughout the movie she watches idly as Dorothy endures hell to reach the Emerald City, telling Dorothy right at the end – in a deus ex machina appearance – that Kansas was two seconds away all the time! Capping it with a sophistic platitude on why she never lifted a finger to shorten the torturous journey:

GLINDA: “You always had the power to go back!”
SCARECROW: “Why didn’t you tell us?!”
GLINDA: “Because you wouldn’t have believed me!”
Someone call the Good Lawyer of The North – I’m gonna sue the wand right out from under this bitch’s dirndl skirts.

Perfectly cast as the green-skinned, cackling Wicked Witch of the West – Margaret Hamilton, who, as the phrase goes, definitely hit every branch of the ugly tree on her way down… Divorced by the time she did this movie and never remarried, one can only imagine the torment her ex endured bedding down with that horse’s face every night, and waking to that trollish, hook-nosed thing on the pillow every morning. Shudder. The story goes that a lot of Hamilton’s Witch performance was too terrifying for little kids of the time, and edited out, but it wasn’t her “performance” – it was that viridian alien fugliness that not even Captain Kirk would tap.

Humbugged as her countenance may be, Wicked Witch is no more evil than you or I when claiming our rightful inheritance. Her dead sister’s ruby slippers are magically bestowed on Dorothy by that whinnying blonde witch – stolen! – and when we examine Wicked’s actions throughout this movie, all she really wants are her family heirlooms back. Under what authority did Dorothy and Glinda snatch them up?

Even as a kid I used to wonder how Wicked was done in with water to the face. Not being as gullible as my kindergarten peers, I considered maybe it was acid, or that they foreshadowed earlier that she had some aversion to liquids – but no. When the plot calls for it, there’s a convenient bucket of water thrown over her and she “melts.” For its illogical suddenness, anything could have sufficed; you may as well throw a pillow at her or a towel or a set of decorative plates and achieve the same result with the same non-explanation as to why it was fatal to her… (The Wizard would remark “So you liquidated her” and my little child-mind connected “liquid” with “water” and I thought it best to accept that tenuous connection and keep my mouth shut because it was obvious all the grownups around me knew better, and they were telling me this movie was “delightful.”)

If anyone was evil in Oz, it was the Wizard. He promises to grant them their wishes (even though he is a charlatan who can do no such thing) if they would kill the Wicked Witch and bring back her broomstick, knowing full well he is sending them to their deaths to protect his charlatanism!

When Wicked captures Dorothy, she doesn’t kill her immediately to get the ruby slippers, rather, sets an hourglass on how long Dorothy has to live – then she rushes off to a meeting to help write the chapter in the Batman Villain Handbook on “Delaying People’s Deaths Arbitrarily.”

When you really think about it: both Glinda and Wicked have real magical powers (they can fly, appear and disappear at will, create poisons and antidotes, spy on you from afar), yet the Wizard (whom they regard with obeisance, taking it for granted he is “great and powerful”) is a mere mortal with smoke and mirrors. Have these actual witches no discernment? Wouldn’t they have tested their powers against his, or at the least requested an audience with him to curry favor, and then inadvertently exposed him when they were chatting over the latest Eye of Newt spells?

All that pouting and theatrical overacting like Shirley Temple (who was considered before Garland) doesn’t disguise the fact that Garland is a little too old for the role; 16 and playing it like a coy 10-year-old. Even her farmhands (Bolger, Haley and Lahr in human form) treat her like a girl not worth wasting askew glances on, but those strapped-down chest buds make me wonder why none of them were trying to get her into more trouble so they could “rescue” her by carrying her out of the pigpen or the horse barn or one of their farmhand nesting places…

When overacting was the ONLY acting…

Dorothy’s last monologue to Glinda is aimed squarely at 10-year-olds who won’t realize it’s pap-on-ice nonsense: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look further than my own backyard because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” And when someone figures out exactly what that means, I’ll eat my couch.

As Dorothy is lamenting that she shouldn’t have left home because everyone loves her there, all I could think of was the opening portion of the film where Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) and Uncle Henry (Charley Grapewin) didn’t give her the time of day, and gave up Toto to the horse-faced man-thing threatening them with legalities (Margaret Hamilton playing Miss Gulch), and where the three farmhands had nothing but directives for her, “use your brain,” “stay out of trouble”… which is the reason why she ran away in the first place.

Upon our return to Kansas, the audience realizes that Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion are the same actors playing her farmhands, and that in Oz they represented Dorothy’s fevered fantasy, so we must ask, Are those her deep-rooted perceptions of her farmhands; that one is brainless, one is heartless and one is gutless?

But why would she think that anyway, as it is subtly shown that each of the doofuses exhibits the exact traits that he desires? Scarecrow uses his brain to get out of jams, Tin Man cries like he’s got a breaking heart and Lion dives into the heart of danger for her. So who’s the real psychological head case here?

Dorothy vows, “And I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again!” Well, until my schizophrenia kicks in again and I perceive that I’m the only sane one around here surrounded by retards…

Five directors would eventually have a hand in the production of WIZARD (including Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, the film’s producer Mervyn LeRoy, and King Vidor), but Victor Fleming would be credited as the director who brought this glossified puling to the screen. Blame E.Y. Harburg for the fruity lyrics and Harold Arlen for the hinky-bippity music.

For 1939, it was quite effects-laden: the tornado scene with visions outside Dorothy’s window; the witch dissolving from riding her bike to a broom; both the witches’ entrances and exits; the flying monkeys, which I imagine would have been magnificently terrifying in their day.

WIZARD is revolutionary in many aspects, and it has entered human culture indelibly, but I find it hard to envision today’s youth, inured as they are with the eye-candy of TRANSFORMERS, the soul-sucking wraiths of HARRY POTTER, or the dinosaurs of KING KONG 2005, batting an eyelid over the supposedly scary flying monkeys, Wicked’s supposed disturbing performance, or the cardboard and matte majesty of the Emerald City.

Older generations who insist that WIZARD still works its wonders on modern kids have no idea what kids five generations below them are attracted to. Recently I saw a 2-year-old sitting in her father’s shopping cart playing with an iPad. I don’t even own an iPad and this little girl was tooling around on it like she was directing the sky traffic in ATTACK OF THE CLONES. If WIZARD-philes are brave enough to put their “delightful to all generations” theory to the test, sit a group of kids down to view it and see how long it takes before they plug in a Blu-Ray Disc less than three years old, start IM-ing their friends or updating their facebook pages.

I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

END